Overview

The growing use of mobile phones has generated vast amounts of data that can be harnessed for policy insights, even in less developed countries. This site contains open resources developed, enhanced and used by the World Bank's Mobility Task Force . These resources help countries put mobile phone data into action toward COVID policy response and recovery strategies.

Human mobility patterns and behavioral insights can be derived from mobile phone data. In most developing countries, where smartphone use is limited, mobile network operator data (MNO) in the format of call detail records (CDR) and administrative data is the primary source of mobile phone data. Smartphones use data services that produce more granular data about user behavior collected from GPS, applications, and other sensors. Working with mobile phone data requires privacy preserving methods that prevent the re-identification of individuals and groups.

Algorithms

The Covid-mobile-data repository contains the underlying alogrithms and documentation to process Call Detail Records Data for human mobility measurements. The code and materials build upon contributions from the open research community and are published under the MIT open licence. The repository includes code for:

  1. Aggregating raw, de-identified mobile phone data into indicators
  2. Quality checks for aggregated indicators to ensure completeness, consistency and identification of outliers
  3. Visualization of the indicators in an R shiny dashboard

Acknowledgements

Several of the resources published in this repository benefited from generous support from UK aid from the UK government through the i2i and ieConnect for Impact programs; support from the Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building III (TFSCB-III), which is funded by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland, and the Governments of Canada and Korea; as well as support from the Research Support Budget in the Development Economics Vice-Presidency.